The Virginia team won third place in headline writing for a March 2009 story, “Oval and Out: OBX can’t be trademarked.” The piece was a case story about a man’s failed effort to trademark the popular “OBX” tag that appears in oval stickers on cars everywhere on the East Coast. In the words of the headline, he was “oval and out.”

And we brought home the bronze in the creativity category for “The VLW Quick 10,” our popular online feature that debuted last June. “Quick 10” lists compiled by our editors have included judges’ nicknames, made-up “new lawyer law firms,” Virginia cases about food, lawyer license plates, reasons to strike jurors that stood up and Christmas carols for lawyers, among others. The full name of the award is the “Justice Potter Stewart Freestyle Creativity Award,” named for the late Supreme Court justice who knew pornography “when he saw it.” The Dolan Media judges took the same approach to creativity.

Our colleagues at St. Louis-based Missouri Lawyers Media, publishers of seven titles including Missouri Lawyers Weekly, took home the competition’s top prize as “Best in Show.”